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Unsurprisingly I am opposed to ID cards. Shocking, I know.
ID cards as being pushed on three main fronts: They will help the fight against terrorism, they will help the fight against crime, they will help prevent and return illegal imigrants.
The terrorism point is my favourite. It uses the public’s ignorance against them something cronic. Almost all of the terrorists involved in the recent terrorist attacks on the UK, Spain, America, etc, have had perfectly valid ID which they left in places they hoped it would get found. They are not like ‘old skool’ terrorists who wanted to plant their bomb and scurry away before it blew up. They are martyrs, they know their bombs will explode with them attached to them. They want that to happen, so who they are either isn’t important, or is very important because they have composed messages to be found once they are done.
The fighting crime point is also quite high in my list of amusing points. They have said, on many occasions, that this will not turn into a case of ‘papers please’. The police will not be allowed to ask you for your ID card during their routine stop and searches, so what’s it going to do for the fight against crime? Oh, of course. The lines about it not becoming a case of ‘papers please’ is just a smoke screen so they can get the cards in place. Once they’ve spent billions rolling out the system, forced everyone to pay hundreds of pounds for the right to be stamped like cattle, they’ll then realse! Oh my god, you know what, these don’t work as tools to fight crime unless the police can ask to see them! Convienient, the opposition will want to cry, but they will quietly allow the amendment because billions have already been spent and the cards are already in place.
Illegal immigrants do not, on the whole, get jobs with reputable businesses. They get jobs at very low rates of pay for businesses which are happy to exploit them. These businesses don’t care now if the person is illegally in the country, what difference is an ID card going to make? There are already in place perfectly viable and useable methods of checking if a person can legally work in this country, the businesses which employ illegal workers are the ones which don’t care what the check returns or don’t even bother to do one at all. There is enough undercover footage of people making it clear that they can’t legally work in the UK and these people being totally unconcerned for this to be considered fact. If the police can’t stop you and ask to see your ID, so how are they going to be able to use the system to find and deport illegals?
The police will eventually be given the power to stop you and ask for your ID card. The majority of people in this country don’t care about that though. They’ve no experience of being harrassed by the police because they’re white. ID card stop and searches will provide yet another reason to stop minority groups, to ask for them to prove their right to exist.
No computer system is perfect. Biometrics are not perfect. What happens if your details are lost or stolen? Can someone tell me how I can get a replacement retina and set of fingerprints please? Once your information is lost there are no ways of changing it. There already exists the technology to clone finger prints, if everyone in the country is on the database then there will be even more reasons for people to develop this cloning technology for all biometric data. Once you’ve lost control of your biometric identity, what then? When the technology is the sole arbitor of your right to exist freely, what happens when someone cracks the database and changes your bio-scans to their own? When your ID card says you’re not you, how do you get your details back? What happens when the more mundane happens and the biometric scanner returns a false when it should have returned a true? How long does that follow you for?
ID card supporters have ignored all of the questions and jumped on a knee-jerk billion pound bandwagon. It’d be sad if it wasn’t going to cost me a large amount of money.
I’ve read it over and over again. I have heard it time and time again. “Nuclear power is the answer!”
I want to just say at the start here: If you have arrieved at nuclear power as the answer, then you’re asking totally the wrong question.
Nuclear power is arguably even more dramatically wrong than squeezing out the last drops of oil, coal and gas from the planet and burning them all. Although one could form a strong argument that enslavement and potential explosions from fissile material stored incorrectly aren’t as bad as mass extinctions, mass starvation and billions of climate change refugees.
The end product from the nuclear process is horrific. Really horrific. It not only requires intensely specialist skills and equipment to deal with safely due to it’s deadly-dangerous, few-seconds-exposure-and-dead-on-the-spot nature, but it also requires long term care. Thousands of years after we have made use of the last dibble of power possible from the nuclear process our descendents will be training nuclear waste management professionals to deal with the waste of a process they’ve never benefited from.
Nuclear power is slavery. The master (each of us) takes the good stuff (the power) and the enslaved (our children and our children’s children) pay for it with sweat and danger and never see any reward. They are forced to taking care of the cheque because the cost of not doing so is higher still.
One of the larger myths is that you can simply pack radioactive waste up and hide it away harmlessly. You can’t. One major reason is that it’s still capable of creating a very powerful explosion if the containers are not separated properly. The separators degrade as they absorb the radioactivity (as is their job) and must be replaced, so you can’t just leave it all and go ‘ho hum, that’s sorted then’. Also we have to keep a lot of the waste in pools of cooled water, which means that energy produced by future generations has already been ear-marked for use on something we have extracted all of the benefit from.
The injustice makes it hard to fathom. How we treat our descendents at the moment is shocking. It would be many scales of magnitude worse if we not only sucked the fossil fuels dry but then also hacked out the uranium and used it all up as well. Every structure which supports our way of life is based on short terms, quarterly profits, yearly profits, the next election or our five year aim. None of it even thinks about the long term. No company is going to stop making their vast profits today because of damage that they’re doing if they can externalise the cost of dealing with that damage. The nuclear power industry does this. They don’t have to deal with their own waste out of their own pocket because they know they just need to hold the country they’re in to ransom. You deal with it, we’re done. If you don’t then, well, you don’t really want to know what then.
The nuclear process is not clean, don’t for a second believe anyone who tells you that it is. In fact, I have taken to laughing in the face of anyone who says that to me in person. The process releases various gases that are much more potent as greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide and some of which degrade over time into carbon dioxide, so you get a surge of high power greenhouse gas followed by a sustained period of less potent greenhouse gas. It also uses oil in the process of mining, processing and transportation.
And to those who might suggest thorium as a less nasty way of generating nuclear power than uranium I have this to say:
* We have no thorium reactors in the world that currently work as the theory intends. There a couple that have been shown can potentially work, possibly, maybe, but they are not being used as thorium reactors, they are being used as normal reactors because the thorium reaction process has a great many bugs to solve before it is commercially viable. Indeed, it is arguable whether it is possible to actually make it commercially viable at all.
* Thorium reactors take a long time to get up and running. A long time. From my research it’s time measured in decades. So even if we were to decide on thorium reactors we may not have time from our current energy sources to actually get enough reactors up and running and make the change over smooth.
* Thorium still produces deadly-dangers, long-lived end products. They are still deadly to anyone who spends a hand full of seconds in their presence and they still require the enslavement of future generations into waste management. Nothing you can do will change that, it’s a fact of the process.
* Finally the maths do not make sense. There is quite a lot of thorium available, which is its major attraction. There’s many times more thorium available than there is uranium. However, if you take into account the whole fuel cycle, from construction of the reactor, to processing the raw material, to safe storage of the end product, to deconstruction and safe storage of the radioactive elements of the reactor at the end of its life, the whole process uses more energy than it makes. If you start to put into the equation the harder to access thorium then it’s many orders of magnitude worse. Indeed, some of the proposed thorium fuel sources require more energy to mine and process than they produce, not even considering every other stage of the fuel cycle.
The reason we are likely to get nuclear power is that it creates many more jobs than renewables do. Sorage and management of the waste employs people, the nuclear power plant employs people, the transportation system required to bring the mined and processed material to the plant employs people, the mining and processing employs people. Maintainance of the wind turbine/solar grid/barrage/etc employs people, transporting the parts employs people, producing the components employs people. I think this quick comparison shows the difference in the number of employees necessary in each process. Shipping parts in the renewable process isn’t steady like shipping the mined and processed fuel is in the nuclear process. Maintaining the fields of units doesn’t require as many people as maintaining and running a complex power plant. Etc.
Nuclear power also has a much more powerful lobbying body, as there is (arguably) much more money to be made in the short term (the only term that matters in capitalist society as can be easily seen from the fact that we even have to discuss nuclear power).
And as a final thought, the tailings from the mining processes for all forms of nuclear reactor technology are themselves poisonous (as are the tailings from all mining operations, but radioactive tailings have an added kick) and are allowed to sit around so they can pollute rivers and other sources of water. The mining companies have promised to fill in the mines after they have finished with clay and the tailings they have extracted, but have yet to actually do this anywhere.
The framing of the discourse of our mass media makes it so most people don’t know enough to arrive at the right questions. The discourse is such that these questions don’t actually make it into the core premise of the reporting, leaving people with nothing but the wrong questions and thus the wrong answer. If every time someone suggested nuclear power as an alternative they were made to explain their position on the enslavement of future generations there might be some sensible debates. If every time someone suggested we need to secure our energy supplies and so need to build nuclear power plants they were asked how relying on other countries (since the UK has no uranium of its own to mine and use) is securing our energy supplies, we might have a sensible debate on the matter. If every person who suggests nuclear power were faced with the impossible to answer questions, the impossible to ignore reality, there might be hope for us.
We’re living on a very windy, wave battered island. We should make use of that. NIMBYs should be given a choice, wind power or no power. Neither isn’t an option, unless they want to disconnect their electricity supply they should be forced to accept that some places are windier than others, some places are better sites for wind farms and so some places must lead the way and have those farms built. We need some form of energy and we need to all take it on ourselves to see that the energy we get is as sane and responsible as possible.
Is a two party system really the way to achieve the best in terms of democracy? When those two parties represent totally different ideologies, and core beliefs I can see it working in a very binary way. Not that it’d be very democratic, just that it would be better than the situation we find ourselves in now, where the only wiggle room between the two parties, the only place to slide a piece of paper and say “verily, these are not the same party” is the colour of the backdrops. Do you like your representative to favour red backdrops or blue backdrops?
Sure, the Conservatives might vote against the government on some issues, but that’s politics. You can’t say “We agree with what this government is doing, it’s all great” because that’s exactly the same as saying “why vote for us, there’s no difference between what we want and what they want”. You have to provide the counter point, the argument, as to why the government is wrong in what they are doing. When pressed on why they were against the government’s plans more often than not the answer is because of minor details in the legislation. While I fully accept that minor details can create big problems and that the details need to be right, the answer which is given isn’t “we disagree with the need for X” it is “we’d do X different in minor ways”. That’s not a choice, especially for people who don’t care for X in the first place.
A two party state is a lack of democracy by virtue of the fact that it only has three choices. i) Pro-government, ii) Pro-opposition, iii) Protest vote. The system favours the government, since many people either believe that it’s better the devil you know or that things aren’t that bad under the current guy. This has given rise to the belief that oppositions don’t win an election, governments lose them.
A while back I heard about the “vote no one, no one would vote for you” campaign and thought it a terrible idea. The main reason I thought it was a bad idea was because abstaining doesn’t make a point. It’s counted as a lazy/apathetic person (recently you could also be accused of happithy, being too happy with the way things are to bother about the elections). This might be the reasoning behind some people not voting, but most people I speak to who don’t vote have reasons along the lines of “they’re all lying scum, why should I vote for any of them?” It’s not that they’re lazy, it’s not that they are apathetic (and it most certainly isn’t because they’re hapathetic), they just don’t see a choice they want to take from the limited stock on offer. They don’t want to vote for a minor party, since the minor party has no chance of securing power and they’re sick of the crap which the main parties are constantly engaged in.
Watching PMQs it’s easy to see why people don’t like politics. It’s all so scripted and fake. The PM has the questions before they’re asked, knows who’s going to make comments against his policy and who will support his policy. He arranges for some little lacky to stand up and ask him a positive question so he can look good and has had his script writers working on his answers to the opposition for as long as they could. Nothing is left to chance. It’s the same as the visits he makes to various places, where he turns up in a throng of people, all Labour activists, all asked to attend and look enthused. Fake.
The media has stopped calling politicians liars where ever they can avoid it. They opt for the word ’spin’ instead. The PM’s Spin Doctors. It’s lies. They’re liars. If you told someone a lie and when they called you on it you said “no, it wasn’t a lie, it was spin” they’d either clock you one or say it was a lie, since that is what spin is.
Why is there the need for spin? Is it because politicians are lying little weasles who wanted power for themselves and never had any intention of using it in a positive way for the community? Is it because 24 hour news coverage means that decisions must be made quickly and decisively in the glare of media attention, then defended whether or not it was the right decision? I think we’re seeing quite a few examples of this in Brown. He takes a few days to make big decisions, which is a really good thing. Big decisions should be taken with care and care requires time. However, Brown gets crucified for it, characterised as indecisive and bumbling by a media who waned the answer to the situation on the day the situation broke. They hate having a story open and running, it needs to be packaged and complete so they can bring in their experts to analyse it and the talking heads to debate if it was right or not. They don’t want to keep reporting the same story day after day since it makes them look bad. They can’t have that so they victimise the PM for taking his time and trying to get it right. I’m not trying to say he does get it right, but taking his time and gathering data is a much better way to get the right answer than to make a snap headline and then try to find out how it will work later.
In a two party state both parties move to cover the centre ground. That doesn’t mean moving to the centre of the political spectrum, but the centre of the general opinion of the country, so the UK’s centre ground is slightly right wing, while the in the US the centre ground is even further right, making their ‘leftist’, ‘liberal’ politicians seem to be the same as our right wing politicians. Parties move to the centre so they have access to the greatest share of votes, because all a politician cares about is being re-elected. Every decision they make which will see the light of day is about securing them another term in office. Many (I’d say every, but how would I prove it?) decisions that wont make the light of day is about self interest.
“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” – Winston Churchill
In June of 2006, Conservative leader David (call me ‘Dave’) Cameron said the Conservative party, if they got power in the next election, would consider scrapping the Human Rights Act (1998) and replace it with a British Bill of Rights. This Bill of Rights would protect the individual without protecting the terrorist or criminal, would protect our rights without protecting theirs.
I remember thinking at the time that it was stupid. The Bill of Rights proposed by Cameron couldn’t contain fewer rights than the Human Rights Act, since the Act already doesn’t include two of the articles of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Act is already as skinny as it could be made. Since the UK is a signitory of the Convention and a member of the EU, we have to follow the ECHR or have the ECHR rights upheld by the European Court of Human Rights. So a Bill of Rights would have to look very similar to the current Human Rights Act. One might consider that Cameron wanted to give people more rights, but since his ’sell’ was about how the Bill of Rights would not protect criminals and terrorists that was highly unlikely.
Now it turns out that a Joint Committee on Human Rights has suggested that we scrap the Human Rights Act and bring in a British Bill of Rights. This time the suggestion is that we include economic rights as well as the rights of the ECHR. Which is interesting.
Of course, the UK Parliament has no method of creating a Bill of Rights. One of the fundamental rules of the UK Parliamentary sustem is the supremacy of Parliament. Parliament today can not bind Parliament tomorrow, else Parliament tomorrow is not supreme. As such, Parliament can revoke any act made by a previous Parliament, including but not limited to removing us from the EU, since our participation in it is contained in an act of Parliament. There is a lot of debate in the political circles as to whether Parliament is actually still supreme with the EU able to make binding legislation on us. It is. Someone who submits themself to the rule of another under their own freewill and retaining the power to remove themselves from that situation any time they wish is still in control. Parliament is still in control.
It has been suggested more than once that Parliament could hold a referrendum to implement the Bill of Rights. However, referrenda are not binding. They are opinion polls of the citizens of the country, not legislation. Parliament is sovereign, not the people. The people get to choose who goes to Parliament to represent them, but that is their only power. Unlike in America where the foundation of the society is the people[1], in the UK the people only serve to legitimise the Parliament.
The formation of other countries’ codified constitutions have almost always been born in revolution and large scale violence. The UK is quite special in the developed world, and in democracies in general, by having an unwritten constitution, Israel is the only other democratic country I can think of off the top of my head which has (or at least had, last time I looked) an unwritten constitution like the UK. Even China has a written constitution (though I’d hazard a guess that it doesn’t protect many human rights).
Amusingly, most constitutions of the world are based on the observations of the UK system, which is why we have never had a constitution historically and why it took until 1998 for the ECHR to be enshrined in UK law. The ECHR was written largly by British lawyers, with British consultants. It was based on the rights held as fundamental by Britain and as such Britain was never expected to do anything other than sign and endorse the document while other countries were expected to alter their laws to put the ECHR centre stage. We incorporated the ECHR in 1998 because of the embarrasment of being the second worst human rights violator in Europe (Italy was number one). We went from guiding principle to second worst offender in the space of fifty or so years.
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[1] The preamble of the US Constitution contains the ideological grounding for the whole document and, although not law in itself, is used by Supreme Court Judges to guide them in their decisions. It reads:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” – Preamble to the US Constitution.
The important part being “We the people…” indicating that the document is by and for them.
The title of this post is a cunning question levelled by Richard Heinberg.
The population growth curve experienced in the last 150 years is similar to the growth curve of yeast as they consume the sugars in order to create alcoholic drinks for us to consume. The yeast then dies off because the liquid it has been living in has been polluted by alcohol which is poisonous to it. We’ve yet to cause a total die-off of the human life on the planet, but we are polluting and destroying the ecosystem we rely on. Are we smarter than yeast?
The growth in human population in the last 150 years has been fed by oil and fossil fuels in general. We have converted these fuels into energy and consumed it to feed the population explosion. In 1850, 65% of the work done in the US was done by non-human animals, 18% by human animals and 12% by machines powered by fossil fuels. Now the work in the US is almost exclusively (>99%) done by machines powered by fossil fuels. The US isn’t abnormal in this regard. The machine percent for the 1850’s might be a little on the high side, but we in the UK aren’t different with regards the modern day use, and neither are most industrialised nations.
A person, over the course of a day, can do approximately 625 Btu’s (British thermal units) worth of work. A gallon of petrol can do 125,000 Btu’s worth of work. If we were to try and replace the work done by fossil fuels by work done by people we’d have to pay the people doing the work around 1/2 a penny an hour for the costs to be relative. In this context it probably starts to make sense why companies which can mechanise look to developing nations for their workforce. If they can’t mechanise a particular job then it costs them over a thousand times more to employ someone in the UK to do the job than it would to get the energy slaves contained in petrol to do it for them. It’s more attractive to get someone who only wants fifty or sixty times the price the energy slaves would cost.
When you start to break into the energy/cost analysis of the comparison between the cost to work ratio of oil compared to the cost to work ratio of people the migration of companies over to developing nations starts to become more obvious. When people first see the migration it doesn’t make sense. Surely it should be more expensive for the company to employ someone over there and ship them over here than it would to employ someone over here and move the goods a shorter distance? Well, in my opinion it should, doing things like that should cost more, not only in fairer wages for the worker but also in massive taxes for the wasted fuel. However, it doesn’t at all. Oil, even at the current price, is insanely cheap for the work it does.
So, are we smarter than yeast? Civilisation’s stories would have us believe that this is a stupid question. Of course we are smarter than yeast, we are the smartest life-form ever, the peak of evolution. However, we are curretly living the life of yeast. We have exploded our population, we are at or close to the peak of our population, we are polluting and destroying the world all around us. Are we going to do the downwards die off too? I can’t see a way we could avoid it. The human population is so over-shot that there is almost no way we can avoid large scale death of humans and non-humans.
We will kick and we will scream. We will continue exploiting and find new ways to exploit. However, we will die and we will prove we are no smarter than yeast.
Further to my previous post I would like to add some facts which are interesting and relevant to the discourse of whether one year’s growth in ice on the North Pole is of any interest unless it establishes a pattern.
Those who track the news will probably have heard the phrase “The hottest X on record” a lot. It’s becoming one of the things which defines modern news broadcasting. This is represented in some facts and figures (‘on record’ means ‘in the last 125 years, since good records began being kept’):
- 2005 was the hottest year on record.
- 2007 was the second hottest year on record, tied with 1998.
- The top 14 hottest years on record occurred since 1990 (18 years).
- The top 24 hottest years on record occurred since 1980 (28 years).
This is a pattern which needs to be acknowledged.
A few people suggest that the cause of recent warming is down to activity on the sun. However, unless the models (which have been able to accurately model historic climate variations and so must have at least some accuracy) are insanely, massively inaccurate then the influence of the variations in the sun are about 1/30th of the influence of greenhouse gas emissions by humans. In other words, quite small and not significant enough to generate 24 of the top 25 hottest days on record.
If you want a more professional version of the information above, along with graphs and much more data, then watch this presentation by John Holdren (can take a few minutes to load).
I’ve posted before about my dislike of the term ‘global warming’ because of the implications of it being so gentle. I’ve expressed a preference for ‘climate change’ because it contains a truer indication of the likely expectations, since while some areas are going to get warmer, some will get colder. While some areas will get dryer, others will get wetter. Etc.
However, I’m coming around to the terms ‘catestrophic climate change’, ‘global climatic disruption’, or ‘global climatic crisis’. The reason being because ‘climate change’ sounds so benign. Like ‘global warming’ it sounds so safe. It sounds like something which can be fixed easily, can be adapted to easily. Change is a part of life, after all. Resisting change can cause problems in itself. As such it must be made clear that the change isn’t benign, it’s dramatic and dangerous.
“Holdren explains that the term “global warming” is actually a misnomer. The term implies that the problem at hand is gradual, when in truth it’s quite rapid; uniform when it is highly inconsistent across all of Earth; mainly about temperature, but it encompasses everything about climate; and potentially benign, although it is entirely harmful.” – Strategic Sustainability Consultant’s Blog.
For anyone wondering how I can write climate change entries with the Arctic seeming to be freezing over again, it’s because one year doesn’t make a trend. The trend is very different. One year of ice growth isn’t a good sign since one year of ice growth can be expected to melt in one year. Persistent multi year ice is the stuff that we have been getting rid of. Losing muti year ice is bad news as it’s more resilient than single year ice, it’s harder to melt, yet last year alone saw a large volume of it melting away.
Even if this year’s ice growth does mark the start of a re-laying of multi year ice, that doesn’t kill the idea of climate change. It would kill the idea of global warming, but as pointed out, it’s not about global warming, it’s about the climate changing, which it clearly is doing. Would I be happy seeing multiple year on year gains of ice over the poles? Yeah, it’d be nice. However, it could also indicate a catestrophic slowing of the Gulf Stream, meaning my house would be on the way to being under a few feet of ice in a couple of decades. That wouldn’t make me quite so happy, even if it meant that polabears survived.
One of the many options being seriously considered to halt carbon emissions is the use of bio-fuels.
One of the many options being seriously considered to halt the waste of resources represented by over-packaging is bio-plastics.
Two solutions which believe that making food into non-food is a shiny idea. Brazil leads the way on bio-fuels and is proud of this. Brazil also has a lot of people starving who have been bought or evicted off of their land by large agri-businesses so they can change the crops those lands grow into bio-fuel crops. Sounds great, huh? This is the real-time result of food for fuel.
Most people are more than willing to pay more for fuel than they are for food. A field growing bio-fuels is more profitable than any food crop the land could support. So what is likely to happen, when we already have poor people around the world, going hungry, growing cash crops on land that could feed them? These are uneducated people. They more often than not believe the corporate salesman when he tells them that they will be better off selling all of this years crop and then buying their seed for next year’s crop from the company. While they’re at it they might as well use this new fertiliser and pesticide, it’ll boost their production. Since you’re using our chemicals you don’t need to employ any of your traditional land management techniques, these products remove the need to do that. And if they’re boosting their production they might as well buy the seed for cash crop X and thus make surplus money to afford to send their children to school and to buy things they want. Sounds good, we’ll take it.
Then they might get a season or three of great growth and it might seem like they’ve made the right choice. Then they might start to see the effects of prolonged use of chemicals on their land, they might start to also see a decline in the level of growth they’re getting. They might start to think that it’s not actually so great to buy their seeds from the company and so try to save them, only to find they’re terminator seeds and don’t grow a second season, so they’re now trapped in the buying cycle and are unable to save their seeds. So, they stop buying the chemicals, their fields weren’t that bad before, they grew the food the family needed well enough. They then find out that the seed they are now trapped buying doesn’t grow or grows very poorly without the company’s fertiliser and other chemicals, so they’re locked into buying them too. Eventually they’ve ruined their fields, spoilt the environment they rely on and are almost indentured to the company, needing to buy the seeds and chemicals each year to further ruin their fields in order to keep any money coming in. Conveniently the money they may get is also dictated by the corporation which is selling them the means to ruin their way of life.
Rambling? I know. Off topic? A little. Unlikely? No. This happens and has happened for many years now.
Even as they starve, people will still export food for money. It happened during the Irish potato famine during the 1840’s and it happened during the Ethiopian Famine of the 1980’s. During both famines the respective countries were exporting food to Britain while masses of people starved in their own countries.
The invention of terminator technology was such a vile attack on life that I can’t believe it wasn’t seen for what it is. People who use technology for such gross violations of sanity should be considered criminals, not pioneers of industry. Products made to do such things should be illegal, not profitable.
Agri-fuel industrialists will bleat about how the current food prices aren’t their fault because only 2% of the food of the planet is used for fuel. This isn’t the point, honestly. The current food prices are probably because of the sharp rise in the price of oil, since food is oil now, but wanting to increase the amount of food siphoned off for fuel will have an impact on the global food prices. People consider their cars to be essential (often because they live criminally far away from their place of work), while fresh, healthy food comes in second place. Most people will live on cheap beans and cheap bread when forced to choose between fixing, fuelling and insuring their car or eating well. The choice for them is obvious.
Putting pressure on a dwindling food supply by making it into plastics and petrol when 30 countries around the world have had food riots this year alone isn’t ethical. It’s not right.
In a world where oil prices push up food prices, where climate change looks set to destroy more and more crops around the world, where the population overshoot continues apace, should we really be thinking about converting food into not-food?
Capitalist society is fueled by wage inequality. It’s the main glue that holds the whole mess together. Not only because it allows those with the majority of the wealth to dictate how things go and thus keep themselves in possession of the majority of the wealth, but also because it acts as a very attractive carrot.
We all know the Local Boy Comes Good story. It’s one of the most fundamental stories of civilisation. It teaches us that, if we only work ‘hard’ enough then we too can join those with the majority of the wealth. This story keeps people content to earn a fraction of top CEOs because, they believe, they too have a chance to earn disgusting levels of income. However, the vast majority of people who are earning seven figure sums have parents who earn such figures. Old money, it’s called. The major deciding factor isn’t the results you have but the place you got those results. If you have Eton and Oxford/Cambridge on your CV that’s what’s important.
Interestingly, what they seem to mean by ‘work hard’ is ‘willing to plunder, abuse and exploit for profit’. There are very few (if any) large companies which have clean records. Most have been fined for breaking the law when it was profitable to do so. Many have factories in developing countries where they can employ children for less than it costs to have three meals a day and work them for 72 hours a week. If hard work truly brought with it the rewards we are supposed to believe it does then these children should have the majority of the wealth. However, they don’t. They can barely afford to feed and house themselves and are forced into working because their parents can’t make enough money for them not to work. Companies get fat and profitable by exploiting such children and supporting the repressive regime which allows them to beat their employees and fire them when they reach 16.
When scandals like those conscerning Enron hit we are always assured that those responsible are just a couple of ‘bad apples’, and that the vast majority of businesses are honest. This is demonstrably not true, all you need do is look at the fines imposed on companies for breaking the law to see that the majority of them will break the law so long as the cost analysis shows it to be more profitable. Edward Norton’s job in Fight Club is the kind of thing I am talking about.
“A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.” – ‘Jack’ The Narrator, Fight Club 1999.
Now, I’m not saying that Norton’s quote above is factually accurate, I can believe it, but I don’t know if there is actually a specific person who does that. However, such cost analysis are done all the time, is it cheaper to pay people damages or to recall this or that line, is it cheaper to abide by fair competition laws or is it cheaper to say to hell with them and absorb the fine, is it cheaper to pay for the licensed loggers to go into the Amazon and cut the limited amount of wood the Brazilian authorities allows, or is it cheaper not to ask where the wood came from and thus buy it from illegal loggers who have no right to cut down trees? So long as option A is more expensive than option B, we take option B, that it’s illegal or not is moot.
Another story we are often told is that if we don’t like what a company is doing we can vote with our feet, hit them in the wallet where it hurts, and make them change their minds. We are supposed to hear this and accept that it is fair. However, this is about as unfair as you can get. Our voting system operates on one man one vote because that is the fairest way to run a system to give everyone an equal share of the power. Voting with your feet is totaly unfair, because it gives Joe Bigbucks many times more votes than Norman Nocash. Joe, by virtue of having more money is a more attractive customer to the company and so is the one they target with their advertising. Norman is the same age and gender as Joe and is interested in all the same things, however because he is poor he isn’t the target audience of the companies advertising and the company doesn’t care what he thinks. So long as Joe is happy to shop there ther company doesn’t mind if Norman never comes throgh their doors again, he could neve buy much even when he did.
Voting with our feet is a fantastic story for the rich to tell. Invariably, those unhappy with the status quo are those who are not benefiting from it. Those who benefit from the status quo (or feel they do by being able to afford McMansions, Hummers, SUVs, etc) are often very content with it. Activists are normally those who are fed up of being stepped on by the system, not always, but mostly. I’ll grant you that most of the activists in support of fox hunting were no where near the bread-line. As a result of this, more often than not the people who care what a company is doing in Nicaragua, the Philippines, etc and want to change it aren’t the ones with a lots of feet votes. But, because they buy the voting with your feet story they are happy to register their displeasure by staying at home and not shopping with the company, despite never really having shopped there in the past and not having any plans to shop there in the future. The story works as an excellent way to keep the number of people who think direct action protests are the answer to our collective problems to a minimum.
People sitting at home watching the TV are even easier to ignore.
After writing my entry about Hobo Stripper’s blog, it got me thinking about the use of the police as an arm of the state designed to remove obsticles to the rich getting richer. I think one of the most compelling and obvious areas where their use in this regard can be seen is in the sphere of protest.
The police have powers under the Public Order Act (1986) to regulate both static assemblies and processions. These powers have very loose restrictions on them. For example, the most senior officer present at a procession can impose any limits he likes (such as changing the route, limiting the number of people allowed to take part, limiting the number of banners, restricting the use of objects used to make noise, etc) so long as he believes doing so will prevent:
- serious public disorder
- serious damage to property
- serious disruption to the life of the community
- the purpose of the persons organising it is the intimidation of others
Most people can probably get on board with 1,2 and 4. They seem reasonable at first glance and so 3 manages to worm it’s way past as well, it’s in reasonable company, after all.
However, how does one quantify the disruption to the life of the community? I don’t know how you would define the life of the community, let alone what serious disruption is. Were the bombings of 7/7 seriously disrupting? Or was that very serious disruption? Is a bunch of people blocking a road serious disruption? Even when section 11 of the Act requires that the police be given 6 days notice of any planned procession?
How does one place protest outside ‘the life of the community’? How does one judge so as to qualify certain acts as within and other acts not within the life of the community? Protest is, we are so often told, fundamental to the democratic tradition. So, if something is fundamental to our way of life, how can it not be part of the life of the community? So how can seriously disrupting it make sense if the disruption is to prevent a serious disruption to the life of the community?
By ‘life of the community’ they mean ‘day to day life of non-protesting consumers’, because, as we know, while protest may be important in a democracy, commerce is the life blood of capitalism and we are a capitalist society much more than we are a democratic one. As such this provision is used to stop protests using busy roads. But, I would contend, a protest which does not inconvenience anyone is a waste of time. The point of a protest is to get noticed, to get attention and to make people think about the cause. These things are invariably done best when the person is put out in some way
Demonstrations which support the status quo are all fine. Things like the Memorial Day marches are fine (most people would not recognise these kinds of things as demonstrations, but they are, they are demonstrating support for the armed forces or veterans of the armed forces, supporting the status quo).
Because the police are charged with ‘keeping the peace’ they are empowered to do whatever is necessary, including detaining you for 7 hours even without you having done anything other than be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The case ,which I can’t remember the name of now, involved a man being detained with a lot of protesters, despite not being a protester himself. The House of Lords ruled that it was fine, since other people might have possibly done something to cause a breach of the peace. Other people might have done something so this man, who told the police he was completely unrelated to the demonstraters, was allowed to be detained for 7 hours. Legally.
So long as it supports the status quo the police can do whatever they like, including push protesters backwards when there is a sudden drop behind them, as can be seen in Taking Liberties.
No one is ever asked if they want to be subject to the power of the police. No one is ever given the choice because there can be no choice. Your input into the process is once every four or five years when it comes time to vote for your colour of preference. This doesn’t change the powers the police can use, of course, it simply means you can take heart from the knowledge that you either helped the new bunch of liars into power, or moan that they’re doing it wrong and how your guys would have been so much better. Truly, if voting changed anything it would be illegal, as are all viable protest methods.
Sorry about the scatter gun nature of this post, I’m a little unfocused.
